I'm calling it first. Sometime in the next week a suspect in heavy football gear is going to commit a mass-tackling at a Counterstrike:GO tournament. Considering the real-world combat prowess of online gamers the fatality and injury counts will be comparable.

The only thing in common is death. I'm just disgusted with the amount of media coverage these shootings get. It encourages more and creates a fear of a super rare event. More people die from doctors malpractice then guns.

Everybody dies from something, if you're willing to wait long enough. If somebody started the fire, or the the fire exits were blocked by the landlord, or the building was a firetrap because of poor regulations, then it would be front-page news. There's somebody to blame. Something that should have been different. Something that needs to be changed. Without that, it's just a stupid capricious accident.

From the point of view of the victim, death is death. But for everybody else, eight people murdered in cold blood by a stranger is more important than eight people dying from a stupid accident.

Ha ha. I don't know. Is alcohol created for the express purpose of killing people? And are gangs of alcohol owners running around, murdering people by holding them down and forcing alcohol down their throats?

Because if not, I don't see the equivalence.

Honestly, do you get this stuff from some sort of NRA advice for trolling internet forums? Maybe you should say something next about the level of knife crime in London.

Anyway. I promised myself years ago to never again to argue about guns on the internet. So I'm going to stop. But really, that was the stupidest counter-argument since "king of the hill" told me that the violent intractability of gun owners is a valid argument against gun control.

Are there gangs of gun owners running around forcing people to learn about guns? I don't think a lot of gun owners are murders. I don't think that is why they own guns. And is it less insidious for something to be the primary contributor to death because it isn't intended to kill, just facilitate all the factors? I have personal friends dead because of alcohol. I've known one person (a friend of a friend from a former church) that shot the tip of his finger off. In my experience alcohol is way worse for everyone then guns. And the statistics bare that out as well. But we don't ban or restrict alcohol for a reason.

We do restrict alcohol, through age, the times at which it can be sold, were it can be sold, and what you can do while drunk. Whether or not that's effective can be debated, but the reasons for not banning drugs don't necessarily carry over to guns.

We're seriously supposed to believe that an educated, freedom-loving gun enthusiast has never heard of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives?

This is either someone who holds people who disagree with him in such contempt that he thinks they're too stupid to fact-check even the most obviously untrue statements or someone who is too emotionally invested in the topic to argue about it rationally.

Is it though? Is anybody stopping them from posting about a fire in Chicago? Is there a massive undercurrent of disgust amongst the population because of millions(billions?) of dollars being spent on lobbying to stop fire prevention research and legislation to go through? (Not yet, but give it time! #ThanksNeoliberals)

As sad as it is I don't think we'll be hearing about this very long. It was carried out with a handgun which does not fit the narrative. To your point about statistics versus what we seem to care about... nothing illustrates the vapidness of the gun control side of debate more than the actual deaths by firearm type versus the proposed types to be taken away from Americans.